Now available with EhP7 and PPM6.0: Enhancements for R&D and Engineering with SAP

Chemical companies seeking to bring new products to market face a wide range of challenges, including paper-thin margins, fickle customers, increasing globalization, and constant regulatory pressure. Companies that can overcome these obstacles and bring the right products to market at the right time can build and maintain a substantial competitive edge. To manage the complex processes that enable new product development, chemical companies need integrated – and innovative – business software that covers Portfolio Management, Project Management, Product Development and Hand over to manufacturing.

The SAP Portfolio and Project Management application gives chemical manufacturers the ability to coordinate resources and projects across multiple business functions, enabling them to hit market windows while – or even before – they are open. Returns on product innovations are maximized by prioritizing project investment alternatives based on staff, time, and cost requirements. Portfolio planning software from SAP allows chemical companies to link ideas and product strategies with project data, workflows, and business processes. It also enables consistent portfolio performance reviews across multiple business functions while helping organizations align product portfolios with customer needs and business goals.

Project Management provides insight into a project’s cost, time, scope, and quality performance in each phase of a product development project. It supports project execution from basic research, formulation, scale up, regulatory affairs, and collaboration support for customer and open innovation. Successful project execution depends on planning, managing, and controlling develop-ment from initial idea to completion. SAP software provides network planning and aggregation tools for tracking and managing project costs, revenues, margins, schedules, and resources.

Project builder functionality lets development teams set up a project and monitor its progress. It simplifies planning and control by providing a global overview based on graphical and tabular data. It can also be used to assign resources to tasks and to monitor budgets and costs. The software helps reduce costs by enabling keener insight into investment and divestiture decisions.

Product Development combines project management with recipe development, substance management, collaboration, costing, and quality engineering. Product development solutions enable companies to integrate new-product information and processes – speeding innovation and enhancing product quality. As chemical companies reduce design cycles and improve collaboration, they accelerate time to market and increase profitability. SAP product development software helps manufacturers integrate the critical steps of product design and augment them with the data and resources needed to develop and release a new product. This includes product development tools that enhance the productivity of development professionals. The software also improves transparency during the product definition phase, which helps ensure regulatory compliance across many regions and countries – a major challenge for most chemical manufacturers. Equally important for chemical companies – since recipes and products must be developed and documented in tandem – the software provides enhanced support for recipe development and specification management.

Manufacturing Ramp-Up combines and synchronizes development processes with manufacturing processes, enabling continuous data synchronization. For chemical companies, which typically develop and manufacture products, the transition from development to manufacturing is a critical step in the product lifecycle. During both phases, a precise and often complex product structure is used to document the product. These structures can differ significantly, as each of them serves a specific purpose. Still, development and manufacturing structures are tightly linked and must be synchronized after any change in product development. SAP software provides guided structure synchronization functionality to support and streamline this activity.

With innovative solutions that enhance the handover from development to manufacturing, chemical companies can make sure that accurate design data is shared in a controlled and transparent manner. The solutions help maintain an ongoing connection between design and manufacturing data. This synchronized information supports critical processes such as reporting, regulatory compliance, and traceability.

SAP´s support for Research and Development and Engineering was recently enhanced by new release of SAP Portfolio and Project management solution (PPM6.0) and with Enhancement Pack 7 of our ERP system.

Energy and Environmental Initiative Management with PPM 6.0

Both an object link into SAP EHSM Environmental Compliance application and the Integration into SAP´s new solution for Energy Intelligence powered by SAP HANA allows now to drive an Energy and Environmental Initiative management. Expenditures for Energy saving measures and related resource savings allow drive a portfolio on most promising energy saving opportunities while the Energy Analytics component later can show the effectiveness and efficiency of those initiatives. The object link enables to link portfolio items and initiatives with financial and further information to facilities. Facility information is directly shown in object link overview of items and initiatives and it is possible to navigate from items and initiatives to linked facilities as facility master data, Emission Management and Compliance Management. The creation of Environmental Compliance Object Link is supported by a search help for facilities.

Enhanced Calculation for Financial KPIs with PPM 6.0

SAP Portfolio and Project management 6.0 provides a set of new financial key performance indicators (KPIs ) for portfolio items and initiatives. These KPIs can be used in various portfolio management scenarios as for example in Energy and Environmental Resource Management (EERM). The following KPIs are provided: Net present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), Return on Investment (ROI), Expected Commercial Value (ECV), Payback Period

The calculation of the new financial KPIs is based on the planned positive (revenues) and negative (cost) cash flows. Therefore SAP Portfolio and Project Management 6.0 provides now the possibility to use also planned and actual revenues in the financial planning views of portfolio items and initiatives based on additional amount types planned revenue and actual revenue.

The set of new finacial KPIs does support managers and controllers in the area of project and portfolio management. The KPIs provide financial information for the business case of the planned portfolio element or planned initiative. Thus management decisions are supported to go for the most beneficial projects, inittiatives or products and improve the business performance of the company.

The functional solution provides

· Periodic planning of revenues in item and inititatives

· Integration of actual revenues in the finacial planning from ERP

· Summary of planned and actual revenue as total and year to date

· Claculation of business relevant fiancial KPIs

· Monitporing of the new fiancial KPIs in item and inittiative dashboards

· Graphical presentation of the KPIs in the reporting cockpit; ECV chart of business context viewer

· Possibility to enhance the new financial KPIs by customer logic.

Technical Improvements for PPM 6.0

PPM6.0 was also technically improved with regards to performance and information life cycle management including Archiving.

Performance improvements refer to code optimizations to handle more data and avoid performance bottle necks and – although still available on relational data bases as well – making PPM available for SAP HANA to help speed up interactive analysis on project portfolios and make PPM ready for SAP´s strategic innovation platform which is SAP HANA.

With that transparency for decision-making is increased since fact-based go/no-go decisions require real-time information on the status of the running projects and the project proposals while Analysis for large portfolios in the portfolio dashboards is time consuming, leading to in transparencies. Moreover faster access to decision-making information in dashboards, e.g. status, timeline, financials and accelerated comparison of running projects and proposal in the dashboards is possible with that based on improved speed of aggregating financial information.

Handover Recipes from Development to Production with Enhancement Pack 7

Manufacturing ramp-up software enables the seamless transition of design data into information that can be used to manufacture products more efficiently and profitably. When data consistency between research and development and manufacturing is ensured, companies can create compliant products that adhere to specification target.

Manufacturing ramp-up software from SAP enables chemical manufacturers to make sure that key requirements defined during the design process will be maintained when manufacturing data is created.

The use of separate but linked product structures allows optimal freedom and flexibility for engineering and manufacturing teams. Streamlined hand-overs – and comparison of changes between development and manufacturing – allow project managers to trace changes via links between engineering and manufacturing product structures.

The solutions support and enhance an ongoing relationship between design and manufacturing activities. This connectivity adds considerable value as products evolve over their lifecycles and also optimizes reporting and regulatory requirements.

With repeatable and systematic data exchanges based on industry best practices, chemical companies are better able to maintain peak efficiency and product quality during critical handover periods.

In the reconciliation workbench, the system displays the source (PLM recipe) and the target (PP-PI master recipe) structure. The target structure shows how the master recipe will be updated when the synchronization starts.

With EhP7 Recipe Data out of development process can be mapped to Master Recipes in PP-PI as follows:

· From the Recipe Process, Master Recipe Header and BOM assignment are crated

· The Stage in Recipe Development is mapped to the Operation of the Master Recipe.

· Equipment Requirements right under Recipe Process are not mapped.

· In general an Equipment Requirement right under the Stage is mapped to a Secondary Resource of the Operation in PP-PI master Recipe. But if the primary flag is set for the EQR, then a Primary Resource and a Resource Selection Criteria are created on the target side.

· Process Parameters that are not directly or indirectly under a source Operation are not mapped.

· From the Operation of the source in Recipe Development a Phase is created in PP-PI Master Recipe.

· The Action of Recipe Development are mapped to a Process Instruction of the Phase.

· Equipment Requirements that are directly or indirectly under a source Operation become Secondary Resources of the proper Phase.

· Process Parameters that are directly or indirectly under a source Operation become Process Instructions of the proper Phase.

If any conflicts arise during synchronization, the system displays these in conflicts resolution windows and user can solve them by using predefined actions. The available list of possible actions can be set in customizing.

Other improvements of Recipe Development Process in EhP7 concern the Recipe Development component as such. To be more precise the Process how to make a product which is part of the recipe beside the formulation. Here it is now possible to independently define building blocks of process elements and use them in recipe. You can also import process steps from another existing recipe, such as when the ingredients are different but the process is similar.